US Declaration of Independence and the current situation in Afghanistan

[Dayuhan]

For the UMPTEENTH time, I have never promoted "US style good governance" for anyone except the US. This is your paradigm, to argue continuously against something that I have never advocated for.

Yes, umpteen times at least, but the substance of your posts on the nature of "good governance" invariably reveal an overwhelmingly American perception of what good governance is and what changes other people need to make to achieve it.

What I have argued, is that there are tremendous lessons to be distilled from the US experience.

Possibly so, but holding ourselves up as an example of how governance ought to be done is likely to be perceived as chest-thumping arrogance, not edification. If we have to choose an example, we mighty want to choose one that the populace in question identifies more closely with

The second option is to focus on the primary source of causation in virtually all insurgency situations: The national government and the unwanted foreign presence. One must identify and address reasonable fixes in the first that are most egregious to the Afghan people; and one must minimize the second.

Are you proposing that the US "fix" Afghan governance? Why would we think we have the capacity to do that?

As I've said umpteen times myself, the way governments govern is not a consequence of institutions or documents, it's a consequence of the national political culture: the way people perceive power and the way power is wielded, the way they perceive relations among the various subsets of the populace and between those subsets and the national government. We can't change the political culture by changing the documents or the institutions. If the new structures are incompatible with the political culture they will simply be ignored. A Constitution in itself has no power at all: whatever influence it has lies in the will of the people and their various leaders to follow it..

This is why "nation-building" and "state-building" are such inherently flawed constructs. Nations and states aren't built, they grow. They reflect the political culture of the societies they govern. We can't build or shape those cultures. Those cultures can evolve and grow, and the nations and states can evolve and grow with them, but they won't evolve at our bidding or in a direction of our choice. The process through which they evolve is often going to be messy, whether or not that suits our interests and preferences.

"Respect" is not a US concept. "Justice" is not a US concept. "Legitimacy" is not a US concept. The natural tendency to act out illegally and often violently against government when one has no trusted, certain and legal means to affect government is not a US concept. Happy to field any arguments from any who thinks they are.

The idea that "good governance" is by definition governance by Us and not by Them, and that the best governance is the one that is dominated by your sub-populace and excludes your rivals, is also not a "US concept". It still prevails in much of the world.

"Respecty", "legitimacy", etc may not be "US concepts", but different people may define those in very different ways.

Afghans will need to sit down and apply their own culture to their own situation to guard against these same critical human dynamics.

What if their own culture, and their own recent history, tell them that the way to sort it out is not to sit down and talk, but to fight and win and impose your will on the other guy, because he will do the same to you if he can and there is no way you can ever possibly trust him to follow any agreement you could possibly sit down and make?

A zero-trust, winner-take-all culture is not going to become something else because we want it to become something else.

But they won't do it if we guard the status quo; and it won't work if just the Northern Alliance participates to the exclusion of the Taliban either. Someone needs to force the issue to bring everyone to the table and sort this out. Or we can go with option one and just go home.

If those are the options, we'd better just go home, because we can't force other people to come to a table and work things out. Even if we could, how long do you think an agreement reached under duress and effectively imposed by an outside power is going to last?

I know you'll say you're not proposing to impose an agreement, but in effect you are. If we FORCE them to come to a table (which they would never do of their own accord) and we FORCE them to reach an agreement (which they would never do of their own accord) the content of the agreement is irrelevant: it's forced, it's unnatural, and it will not last.